patrick.net

Rather wait till prices correct.

"Americans believe they can get rich by spending someone else’s money. They believe that foreign countries actually want to be invaded and taken over. They believe they can run up debt forever and that their debt-laden houses are as good as money in the bank."

"That is what makes the study of contemporary economics so entertaining. We sit at our telescopes and laugh like a divorce lawyer looking at photos of rich man in flagrante delicto, we know there is money to be made." - Empire of Debt, a New York Times Bestseller

If one wants to live the life now, spend about $2,500-3,500 renting a $1M- $1.5M home is certainly living it up. There are plenty of rentals like that, in a great school district, nicely remodeled, some even with amazing view.

The house would sell for $1.5M in the current market, PITI + property tax + insurance, you go figure. But all you need to pay is $3,500 a month while the landlord bites the negative cashflow. Morever, if you have a great credit record, you can even negotiate it down, because renters with good record have all jumped on the housing bubble bandwagon so they are hard to come by. The landlord would rather take a $300-500 haircut on rent than leaving their biggest investment in life to careless hands.

Even if you have 10Hahas in cash, put it in the bank, 5% gives you $75K pretax every year, more than enough to rent a nice home while it depreciates. When you grow tired of the home, just pack and leave for another.

Spring is a good season for a fall.

THUD!

Owneroccupier Says:
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Unlike the US, ALL land is owned by the state and you can only lease it for 50 years (commercial and retail) and 70 years (residential). How does the government obtain occupied land in the center of the city for re-development? Well, pretty much whenever and whatever the government wants, the resident need to hand over, sometimes receiving very little compensation.

Fair enough, although, interestingly, the US govt has the right of eminent domain - the state grants you freehold use of your land, which can be revoked, and further obligates you to pay various taxes on it, etc, under threat of seizure or forfeiture, I suppose... There's a hierarchy of title, with allodial title being the highest level of (sovereign or govt) ownership, free of taxes, etc, and fee simple being the 'owner-occupier' level of freehold...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain & Allodial_title & Fee_simple

Owneroccupier Says:

"Especially in the Silicon Valley, it is soooooo hard NOT to hire an Asian employee, just based on the quality and quantity of job applicants alone, you will have overwhelmed your AA quota by far."

Before you settle in on the superiority of the Asian student, not so fast cowboy.

I went to school in Cali and I think some Asian students are overrated.

I saw a lot of networking, notes floating around from prior semesters, cherry picking professors, student giving friends heads up about what was coming up on tests, etc.

They had the system down to almost a racket.

A lot of them couldn't write worth a shit either and relied on others.

Just my observation.

You can go back to your Asian supremacism now.

I/O ARM Beautiful mansion in the daytime that at night literally starts to ‘eat’ its new buyers after they move in and the financial difficulties start arising one after the other. Lots of feelings of the uncanny, and some outright frights.

Sounds more like an advertising executive's idea for a discount mortgage lender's campaign, doesn't it? 30 second commercial... they have a 'tame the mortgage monster' ad here...

Ha Ha Says:
March 25th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=410329
New derivatives can hedge against falling housing prices
By JOHN SPENCE

There’s your answer, Peter P - how to make money in a falling market by the attempted management of uncertainty and risk…

On the management of risk, has anyone read The Politics of Uncertainty? by Peter Marris - political economy… definitely not a read for technocrats looking to design new instruments tho…

OwnerOccupier
But the acuteness of problems and cover-ups, and the division of the nation are all getting more and more noticeable.

It is like the American government is trying to learn from the Chinese admin on how to deceive its people.

more like learnign from orwell's 1984 - orwell actually worked in intelligence in WWII, which is where he got his ideas from...

It's happening here somewhat too, even under supposed 'Labor' govts, financial mismanagement and major costly screwups, lack of concern for costs of living for ordinary people - govt advisers and ministers are almost like psychopaths for putting burdens on ordinary voters without regard for what they can afford, etc. There's also a flow-on dishonesty effect in all those countries who dubya's team strong-armed into joining the 'coalition' - the leaders in UK and Oz have to keep spinning all the lies on behalf of dubya... some of the little countries outright said 'they were shamefully deceived' after the fact...

Ha Ha Says:
March 25th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
It won’t take a collapse in prices (and I don’t believe we’ll see that) to cause serious economic harm in the currently hottest housing markets around the nation.

It's probably all been done here before, formally and informally, but, if we accept that there's a housing bubble which is harmful to individuals, and both the micro- and macro-economies, then what have been the biggest human drivers in list form that cause this market dysfunction? (I also argue there are problems with the equitable distribution of housing in society right down to the homeless population, as a spectrum.)

My starting list is:
Institutional
- low interest rates - the 'sole lever' possessed by central banks to 'manage the economy'
- volatile or poorly performing stockmarket and other investment classes
- permeability of housing to other (failing) markets (cash, shares)
- tax breaks from govts
- laissez-faire and unregulated housing market as far as pricing goes

Market
- liberalised credit products from lenders
- realtors' lies
- developer greed
- lender greed
- spruikers/false gurus running 'boot camps' etc

Social
- realtors' lies again
- spruikers/false gurus again
- easy credit
- conditioning effects of price rises
- tulip boom/tech wreck effects (don't want to miss out!) + need to supplement kids college funds or pay for medical insurance in some countries
- greed-fear-greed-fear
- everyone else is doing it and making a motza
- irrational exuberance (influenced by all of above)
- perceptions of housing as a 'safe' and stable investment, both occupying and investing

needs a separate topic, which may have already been done... now it all looks too hard...

Back from Lake Como, and I see nothing has changed here.

Nope, still the same, cock sucking fucking maggots like you keep posting their tired fucking diatribe. Hey do your daughters still dress like those cum gobbling whores the Hilton sisters?

Did anyone see the CAR report getting any mention in San Jose Mercury News ? I did not see it. Neither in their print edition, nor online. They did mention the NAR report about 5% increase in nation wide sales. But forgot to mention an unconfortable news from their own state.

@Ha Ha, I have come to enjoy your posts and really dig the fact that a HaHa has become the defacto currency marker on patrick's.

Congress should enact a program of earned legalization for those law-abiding, hard-working, undocumented aliens currently present in the United States, for our economic well being as well as theirs.

We should definitely help law-abiding illegal aliens. They can take as much welfare as they want. On the other hand, it is perfectly patriotic to buy imported goods that are produced domestically.

Ha Ha Says:
March 26th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
I wonder why activist film makers such a Michael Moore does not do a film on Credit Bubble/Housing Price Absurdity…..

hmm, good question. too ephemeral, and off the radar of the 'big social issues'. he might focus on rampant homelessness. his latest thing is HMOs... interestingly, i think that welfare states with cheap, universal health care but over-priced housing are potentially no better off than the US system of potluck healthcare and oftentimes cheap housing...

quote from my blog:

"The main barrier to progress appears to be that housing continues to lie off-centre from the main economic, social and political concerns of governments at all levels. In part, this involves an inertial lag effect. For most of the post-War period, the vast majority of Australians have been well housed by historical and international standards. Housing, labour and financial markets worked together to ensure that housing standards were adequate or better for perhaps 85 per cent of the population. A similar proportion of the population became home owners at some time during their lives. The fact that this dominant housing career and expectation has broken down over the past 20 years appears to have eluded many policy makers, who still look to the housing market operating within conventional parameters to meet housing needs for all but a tiny residualised group in the population.

It is this dominant view—along with the tendency to uncritically celebrate house price inflation as a sign of a healthy economy and domestic world—that needs to be taken head on by people concerned with both Australia's long term economic sustainability and the immediate social problems of declining housing affordability for an increasing number of Australians."

Show me the money: financing more affordable housing - Mike Berry

i dunno, this blogsite has problems with posting a lot of the time, not to mention being cumbersome. i'm trying to get patrick to re-develop as a proper threaded forum with CHAT rooms!

Your friendly Indian allies:

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has had to deal with the querulous left allies, without whose support his government cannot survive, for quite sometime now. Given their anti-US postures left protests were expected during the visit of US President George W Bush to India. However, it is the massive anti-Bush rallies in which Muslims participated that caught New Delhi unawares. It is perhaps the first instance of pan-Islamic sentiments so strongly expressed by the Muslims in India who number close to 150 million in the country, the largest population after Indonesia.

Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Lucknow, the capital of UP, in which four people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed and several injured. Elsewhere, across the nation, Muslims took to the streets in thousands chanting “death to enemies of Islam” and “down with US.” A mock funeral of Bush was staged at Hyderabad, a city that he visited.

http://militaryweek.com/southasiacalling.shtml

A memorandum submitted to Manmohan by Muslim leaders stated: "in the post cold-war era the American imperialism has posed a serious threat to the world order based on mutual respect for the sovereignty of every country. Unprovoked aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and a threatening posture against Iran has proved beyond doubt that the new security doctrine of pre-emptive strikes to destroy all foci of potential resistance to American dictates of world order has blurred and finally erased the distinction between peace and war."

Indeed, India’s stand against Iran has been a sticking factor with the Muslims in India. New Delhi has been unhappy with Tehran repeatedly dragging India into its problems with Washington. On Sunday Iran trashed the US for its "double standards" in signing the nuclear deal with India. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Washington was systematically trying to show Teheran in a bad light. "The United States' approach is a form of double standards. It signed a contract with a country that was not a member of the non-proliferation treaty. That is objectionable. On the other hand, it approaches Iran in such a (bad) way." India has not signed the NPT, which it says is discriminatory. Iran has voluntarily signed the agreement.

New Delhi has been trying to broker on behalf of Iran and has been instrumental in buying more time for Tehran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meet in September despite the anti-Iran vote. The November meet of the IAEA postponed action due to active behind the scene lobbying by New Delhi officials. Matters were relatively quiet on this front, until in January this year when Tehran removed UN seals from three nuclear facilities, ending a two-year suspension of uranium enrichment-related activities.

i know a few indians who say the whole place is mired in corruption, and no-one can do meaningful business as a result. to call places 'democracies', and see them all as strategic allies when in fact they have their own self-interested agendas would be a grave geopolitical mistake. for instance, india needs oil to industrialise, and guess where the nearest source is?

i haveen't even got wordpress working... is that the secret? should just get good quality forum software : (

i wouldn't fight 'em... they feud to the death, even the ones who've emigrated to australia... and there's lots of them... iran is 4 times the population of iraq and 4 times the area - and indonesia has 250 million muslims....

if they have depleting oil, then i guess international interest in those regions will go down, and there will be less tension and conflict between east and west... borders mean that populations cannot shift far, so if they cannot support the populations after peak oil, i don't know what happens...

i don't know about pax americana, i think that's an overstatement - the view here is that the US has corruptly meddled in too many other countries in the last 50 or 60 years, and causes a lot of the world's strife and mischief by appropriating an unfair share of resources through economic imperialism, covert activity and gunboat diplomacy...

funnily enough, the romans were always looking for pretexts to invade. they used to trigger wars of conquest by saying that the people in a new territory had offended one of their 'friends' in a neighbouring territory and that they therefore had to intercede. sometimes they even fabricated allies in neighbouring territories to do it. but they had a big 'discourse' about how they were civilising the world, etc, as they expanded, but they were ultimately warlike and unpopular, causing the germanic tribes to turn back on them eventually.... the equivalent militarisation may well be the truman doctrine...

hmm, maybe there is a perfect storm of peace, economic co-operation and sustainable development, on the other hand...

just hum the words to Imagine...

I think it's a shame that this thread peaked at only 299 comments. If only someone would come by and make it an even 300. Oh, well... :-(